MONUMENT TO THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

2010A proposal

In 2010 the city of Geneva invited Esther Shalev-Gerz to participate to an international competition for a monument to the Armenian genocide.

The catalyst of her proposition is the fact that this century-old crime has not yet been acknowledged by those who committed it. Not publicly recognized, the genocide is not established as such. Therefore extended and not integrated in History, it remains in denial.

Carved from a single stone block, the sculpture presents the interiority of a room with three walls removed. This room is simultaneously an enclosure and yet opened out, a simple and realistic intimate space, exposed to the world. In the wall, a seam that separates and joins: a closed door. On both sides of the wall and door the same room is symmetrically reflected, mirrored, and so reversed: thus betraying its normal function so that every part is hidden from the other. Only the outside world can see them both at once.

Against this wall, two life-sized chairs back-to-back. Each of these vacant spaces is an invitation to sit, pause, and take a stance in a most firm and physical sense thus sharing and feeling for an instant the burden of waiting. The chair also speaks to an absent and silent Other. Not only for sitting, it contains a message, a call to the executioner to declare itself as such because denial and suffering, victims and executioner, recognition and grief, justice and liberty are all inseparable.

The second artefact present on the ground of each symmetrical interior is a facsimile of the Armenian genocide memorial plaque initially installed on Mount Davidson near San Francisco by its Armenian community. This plaque was immediately stolen. That is why Shalev-Gerz decided to make this plaque appear twice, repeated as a gesture to reconfirm our need of commemoration and to signal disorientation. The Armenian community, forced into exile, is fragmented and scattered widely which makes it all the more difficult to establish a grief process.

In the case of recognition of the Armenian genocide by the Turkish State, the date of this event would have changed the monument by being added to it – and so including the possibility for its own point of departure to be reconciled with the unknowness of the future.